Klaus Stärk has
submitted an interview he recently conducted withCharles Samuels aboutNoatun. Noatun is KDE's powerful multimedia (video/audio)
player. Klaus tells us that Noatun will be the "Application of the
Month October 2001" on the German
KDE-webpage, so the interview will be translated into German at that time.

Klaus (Q):What does "Noatun" stand for? Is it an acronym for something?

Charles (A):
It's not an acronym at all. It's related to my nickname on IRC (Njaard -- a
misspelling of the Norse god Njord). Let's leave it at that.

Q:How did you start the Noatun-Project and who else is involved in
developing it

A:
Noatun was started on August 26, 2000, well, that was the first commit. I'd
been thinking about it already in March of that year, I decided that there
needed to be a media player that could play everything, and one that didn't
have silly skins.

It evolved quite a bit, and later that year, the core was pluginified, the
user interface was implemented (now known as Milk Chocolate), and the
playlist (now the Split Playlist) was created.

It developed quite rapidly, especially since I made a deal with myself: I
will not play a single bit of music unless it's with Noatun, and I listen to a
lot of music, so, within that week, I was playing music. Not well, mind you,
the playlist hardly worked, and the UI didn't do much related to song length
and title.

Q:What other oss-projects are you involved in?

A:
A couple of minor projects,ITC, which, BTW, was
created to make it easy for me to write multithreaded codecs foraRts (kdenonbeta/arts/modplug
has now become a threaded one, with ITC)

Q:How was it decided to add Noatun to KDE?

A:
From the very start, I created it in the hopes that it would be part of KDE.
Kaiman was . . . inadequate, to say the least. In addition, I have a strong
dislike for skins (which is strange, since I wrote what may be Noatun's best
skin loader, KJofol), and Kaiman was, at the time, unmaintained, and lacking
many features.

Q:You visited the LWE in SF this week where you had the joy of accepting the
"Best Open Source Project" award in the name of the KDE-Project. What did
you think of that?

A:
Well, it was nice! I can't say I was too shocked, but I certainly was
pleased, and the large amount of KDE developers present made it even better.

Q:How do you see the future of multimedia apps for KDE, especially Noatun?
What can the KDE-user expect from these apps?

A:
It will get better. We're working on making Noatun itself much more powerful
and extensible via plugins. It's designed bottom-up to make a huge amount of
features in the form of plugins, and KDE 3.0 will make this hold even more
true. Multimedia-wise, support for more formats, more features, different
effects.

Q:Which is your favourite feature in Noatun?

A:
Probably that the user-interface is a plugin. I still in fact use the
original user-interface (Milk Chocolate), however, nobody else is forced to.
Although, Young Hickory is real nice.

Q:What do you do in your sparetime when you're not coding for the
KDE-project?

A:
I don't understand the question . . . ;-) Seriously, I'll be
starting at a university in a couple of months, so until then, I get to
code to my heart's content. Until I get a job *hint*. There's also a
lot of non-KDE stuff I've written (which you get to hear about if you
find me on irc.kde.org)

Q:What's your opinion on the future of "Linux on the desktop"?

A:
I think that Linux is a desktop OS, and it will slowly kick lesser operating
systems off the market. And with Linux's popularity increasing, KDE's will,
along with FreeBSD's and the like.

Comments

Charles, what do you think about the Tabs versus Spaces for indentation situation in KDE? I am never sure which to use and I am not happy about the state of Spaces and Tabs in KDE CVS! We should do something about this.

What does 4 spaces mean ? 4 spaces.
What do you intend when putting them ? Indent.

Just as the newline character means a new line,
et the tab mean indentation (or tabulation).
That was it is for.

The first thing you learn while writing XML/SGML
documents is that contents is not presentation.
You waste your time if you take care of presentation
(ie : counting tabs, and why 4 tabs after all - it's
a presentation choice) while coding. Tabs acts as
a XML tag that says... indent !

Let your editor handle the look of your code, and
put only the core meaning in your files.

Definitive my ass. The fact that you prefer it hardly makes it definitive. Plus it was written by Charles. Not to downplay his significance in KDE, but he's hardly an authority on all of programming. K&R say style is choice of the coder (what a shock!), and the only thing they recommend is sticking with the same style throughout your code, which is excellent advice.

Yeah... really definitive, anyone who uses tabs for identation will eventually use a space (mainly when you break statements into multiple lines) and... voilá, your code now visually suck everywhere but your editor (good luck trying to avoid it). Anyway tabs or spaces are a matter of personal choice, there's nothing definitive about that. I use spaces... I want my code to look the same everywhere... maybe I'm evil, but that's my choice.

i'd LOVE to see a xine plugin! (xine.sourceforge.net). using it you'd get mpeg (ok that's duplicate but last time i checked i found rendering noticeably better than with mpeglib), mpeg2, DVD (that's the selling thing, and no MPAA risks, you install the DVD-unscrambling thing as a plugin if you want, xine does NOT include it :o) ), AVI, etc etc.
and now xine is split out in a library and a UI module so it's possible... it's be great to have it integrated in noatun..

This is a question. Could you give me som info on the NOATUN media player? I need to know How it works, where the files are saved and how they are saved. Also if you could, what files it plays and what it does not, and any additional info you think is helpful. I appreciate it. Thanx, Dan Tenters

In fact noatun is just a GUI for ARTS. ARTS is KDE's multimedia server. So, if ARTS can play a file, noatun can and vice-versa. IIRC, ARTS uses a plugin system to read different file formats. On my machine, ARTS can play WAV, OGG, MP3 as well as MPG, ASF, AVI, DIVX etc... If you want to read the latest video formats (DIVX, ASF etc...), you have to install the "xine-arts" plugin which enables ARTS to play every file that Xine (the video player) can read. So, if ARTS can play them, then Noatun (and kaboodle and any ARTS-enabled application) can read it.

Mandrake was too busy getting its release candidate for version 8.1 out the door. Said release candidate does include KDE 2.2.1. Switch to SuSE if you wish but there is no need to utter calumny against Mandrake's deservedly good name.

The Idea behind Noatun is quite nice. The problem is it just doesn't seem to work. Upto now I never had a version that didn't crash right away after starting to play a simple .wav or .mp3 file. I regurlarily build CVS versions and right now I'm running 2.2.0. Well, maybe I have to wait a while. Until it's ready I'll use xmms...

My first impressions of noatun where also not good. It was ugly and complex. But now in kde 2.2 with a nice skin I like it.

I also use mostly xmms. The reason is simple: xmms doesn't use the soundserver and blocks the /dev/dsp device so I don't hear the embarrassing kde window manager sounds when listening music :-)))
--Bram.

Please have a look at the CVS-version of MPlayer! (http://mplayer.dev.hu)
It plays just about anything (including WMV8). They also have QuickTime and RealMovie support in the TODO-list... (or at least talk about it on the mailinglist). It is also the fastest DVD-player on Linux.
A nice improved Windoze Media Player 6.4-alike KDE-GUI to this beast would make it the best Movie-player there is on any platform!
Also take the DVD-menus support from Ogle (http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/) !